Job description

This is a senior engineering position on M-KOPA’s backend engineering team. You will work with a small team of engineers, product managers, and testers to deliver solidly architected + tested services, and to maintain those services in production.

REQUIREMENTS

Education: A degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent experience / self-directed learning. (We care much more about your skills than about how you acquired them).

Experience: At least 3+ years of experience working as a professional software engineer/architect on medium/large scale distributed systems.

Knowledge / Skills:

• Experience shipping high-quality backend code into production.
• Experience orchestrating and managing cloud infrastructure (preferably in the infrastructure-as-code paradigm, or a willingness to learn)
• Comfort with the devops culture, and with the idea of being involved with the management of the systems that you build through their entire lifecycle.
• Collaborative spirit and a strong desire to learn from teammates and to work as part of a team that is greater than the sum of its parts.
• Experience with C# would be an asset but, for the right candidate, experience with any object-oriented language can easily substitute.
• Experience building software for the financial services industry would be an asset.

Engineering at M-KOPA

M-KOPA runs a highly collaborative engineering team; in doing so we also do everything that we can to maintain high standards for architecture, implementation, and process.

Our goal is to ship reliable services that help our users improve their lives and that are easy to integrate and maintain as we grow both our business and our engineering team; in parallel, we also want to foster a friendly and open engineering team that gives all team members opportunities to learn and grow. We try to achieve these objectives in a way that is supportive, participatory, and continuously open to change.

M-KOPA’s engineering team is distributed across the UK, Europe and Africa and was already fully remote pre-Covid and will remain fully remote even once the pandemic situation resolves and office life returns.

M-KOPA strives to create a team environment that provides opportunities for synchronous collaboration when beneficial (this is why we keep a relatively narrow timezone range (+/- 3 hours East Africa Timezone) for all of our employees) but that also benefits from asynchronous written collaboration when we consider it to be helpful for reducing context-switching and preserving focus. We currently do not do any face-to-face collaboration but that will start up occasionally (e.g. 1-2 times per year, likely in rotating locations in Europe) following the resolution of the Covid situation.

Remote employees who are interested are also able to travel to our markets in Kenya, Uganda, or Nigeria at least once per year to interact with customers and with our commercial teams (again, post-Covid).

As a remote-first team we put significant emphasis on employee well-being and balance. While M-KOPA engineers are dedicated and hard-working, overtime work is rare - restricted mostly to production incidents or occasional out-of-hours deployments, both of which are compensated with commensurate time-off. We want our engineering team to be rested, motivated, and happy in their lives both inside and outside of M-KOPA.